1 Opportunities
Opportunities for Engineering professionals and interns are
*immediately*available. Read on for the details.
2 About Us
2.1 VLEAD
VLEAD is the "Virtual Labs Engineering and Architecture Division" of the
Virtual Labs project. VLEAD's mandate is to design and architect the
implementation framework for Virtual Labs. Virtual Labs is an initiative of
the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of India , under
the National Mission on Education through ICT. Its goal is to build labs in
engineering and sciences accessible over the web for college and university
students. Approximately 180 virtual Labs are being built in twelve
institutes across the IIT's at Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur,
Madras, Roorkee and NIT Surathkal, College of Engineering Pune, Dayalbagh
and Amrita Universities, and IIIT Hyderabad. For more details, please visit
*Sakshaat* virtual labs at http://vlab.co.in .
We are located at IIIT-H, Gachibowli, Hyderabad but we plan to have some
personnel located in IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi.
2.2 VLEAD's role in Virtual Labs
The broad role of VLEAD is to form the bedrock of research, systems
development and software engineering of the virtual labs. This includes R&D
work of designing frameworks to support various aspects of virtual labs
like deployment, packaging, distribution, user management, persistence,
etc. It also includes engineering the integration of these labs to the
frameworks, and finally, supporting those using the labs. VLEAD (earlier
called SEVILLE) has already been involved in providing infrastructure and
back end engineering services for around 40 teams developing virtual-labs
right from the initial days. For this year, this support needs to be scaled
up for 180 teams and this requires heavy engineering and framework
development.
3 Overview of activities at VLEAD
This section illustrates the kind of things we do or will be doing at
VLEAD.
3.1 Systems Engineering
One of VLEAD's main deliverables will be to provide a cloud of servers for
the entire life-cycle of virtual labs, viz., development, testing, hosting
and distribution of virtual labs. Technologies, we currently use in the
VLEAD systems engineering include
Debian GNU/Linux, KVM, Xen, OpenVz, tinydns, Apache, Sqlite, MySQL,
iptables, qmail(deepOfix), OpenLDAP(deepOfix), ezmlm(deepOfix), Bash &
Python
3.2 Software Engineering
VLEAD will design the process of origination of a lab till it is delivered
into the vlabs eco-system. There are several APIs present and several more
needed for the current growing trend of Virtual labs development. The
process keenly follows the principles of SDLC and provides a very efficient
software engineering model for the vlabs. The defined process takes care of
version control, bug tracker, release mechanism of vlabs. The view of a
virtual lab as a software product makes it necessary to employ the above
processes and principles of software engineering.
Technologies currently used in the software engineering of virtual labs
are: Subversion, Ruby on Rails, Redmine, Javascript, Java, C/C++, PHP,
HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and Python
3.3 Document Engineering
VLEAD believes in strong documentation principles for future reference and
also as a self explanatory notes for the new ones. In VLEAD, every
engineering process and decision is documented and archived. At VLEAD, we
extensively use free and open source technologies like \LaTeX, Emacs Org
Mode, Subversion, Mediawiki, dot (graphviz), GIMP, and Inkscape and also
scripts in emacs, python and makefiles to drive the document generation.
3.4 Outreach Engineering
Nothing is worth until it is known to others. An important long term goal
of VLEAD is to provide all the engineering support needed to evangelise
virtual labs at other colleges, encourage the participation of developers
and potential users wherever they are. VLEAD will build frameworks for
technical support for holding workshops for developers and field trials.
Building a community of users and developers is the only way to sustain the
virtual labs.
4 VLEAD deliverables for the next one year
The main deliverables of VLEAD are:
Framework developmentThe virtual labs framework that has partly been built
needs to be completed. Integration180 virtual (simulation) labs need to be
integrated onto the virtual labs framework that includes an svn server and
a project management portal. Each lab is run by a separate team of lab
developers located across the country. HostingThe 180 virtual labs need to
be hosted on a single cloud platform from a data centre. MirroringThe
hosting site is to be mirrored at a location elsewhere in India.
5 Contract Engineering Positions at VLEAD
5.1 Number of Engineering Positions
We have engineering positions open for "Project Systems engineers" and
"Project Software Engineers" for those interested in any of the following
above areas: framework development, integration, hosting and mirroring of
Virtual Labs. Depending on the need and the skill set, the person recruited
will be placed at an appropriate level of seniority. All the positions are
on contract basis.
TypeBasic qualificationSkills S/W Engr.BTech/MTech in any
discipline,Demonstrably
strong background in
preferably CS.programming and S/W Engg. Systems Engr.BTech/MTech in any
discipline,Strong background in
preferably CS.Systems, design, automation
and documentation. Linux and or Windows
Qualifications may be relaxed for exceptional applicants.
5.2 Internship opportunities
Talented and exceptionally motivated students interested in an internship
may also apply. They will be paid a student stipend.
5.3 Additional attributes
Enthusiastic, self-driven and highly motivatedThe person should be able to
take up an ill-defined problem, and deliver something substantial
about it. Excellent
communication and interpersonal skills
The person should be *very* comfortable in writing technical reports,
memo's and other documents. The person should enjoy working within a group.
FOSSExperienced with the use of FOSS technologies and appreciative of the
FOSS philosophy. InitiativeWilling to cheerfully attend to critical tasks
at odd times.
6 Salary
Salary is negotiable and will be competitive and commensurate with the
candidate's qualifications, experience and skills.
7 Perks
Since VLEAD will be located on institute campuses, interns and employees
will have the following perks:
- Opportunity to attend classes (contingent upon instructor permission)
and other academic events (seminars and workshops) on campus.
- Free hosting for your own website.
- Huge real estate (on the web), shell access and backup options :-)
- Friday dutch lunches :-)
- Music surround system
- Table Tennis
8 Procedure for application EmailPlease email to
*jobs at virtual-labs.ac.in*with your name on the subject line along with
* "Internship" or "Job" *on the subject line. ResumePlease send us a PDF or
a url. RefereesWe are interested in the opinion of anyone willing to
comment upon your skills and abilities. Please include names of at least
one referee in your application. ProjectsPlease include links, if you have
them, to any projects that you have contributed or continue to contribute.
This would be a big plus for considering you. Coding and/or writing
samplesPlease
include (as links), if you have them, any samples of code, documentation or
technical reports that you have written.